Sugar — The Bane Of Human Health In Excessive Amounts.

But yet oh so profitable for processed food manufacturers!

We face an endless barrage of sugar at every turn. It’s not just the sugar in confectioneries such as those pastries above. Chocolate bars? Ice cream? Fruits? Cereals? Juices and soft drinks?

Wherever we go, we are bombarded by it, and we do know that consuming too much sugar isn’t good for our health. However, therein lies a complication — this deluge of sugar is good for business.

Manufacturers found it better for business to use high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) for preparing all those processed foods because the use of HFCS (i) promotes the shelf life of a processed food product, (ii) the high concentration of reducing sugars in HFCS contributes to a better Maillard browning effect and (iii) there is better product stability overall.

The biochemistry of sugar in the body

HFCS is manufactured as a solution of sugar in water and comes in 42% fructose (HFCS 42) or 55% fructose (HFCS 55) solutions, while the rest of the solution comprises glucose and water.

According to the US Food and Drug Administration, HFCS 42 is mainly used in processed foods, cereals, baked goods, and some beverages. HFCS 55 is used primarily in soft drinks.

If you haven’t dealt with HFCS 42 or HFCS 55 before, it appears as a plastic-like substance that is more viscous than honey. It’s not that fun to mess with. I had the privilege of dealing with it while concocting synthetic wastewater for treatment in a biological reactor, and it just wasn’t that pleasant to deal with. Of course, we were looking at helping a soft drink manufacturer find more efficient ways of dealing with their wastewater to meet industrial discharge regulations.

But I digress. These HFCS sweeteners are extremely rich in reducing sugars. These reducing sugars are pro-oxidants — they will have the ability to extract electrons from other organic chemical or biochemical molecules around them.

While we may see them as merely glucose and fructose, we do have to understand that enzymatic activity in the body will convert fructose into glyceraldehyde. It can also convert glucose into glyceraldehyde. Glyceraldehyde, of course, is an aldehyde that contains a pro-oxidant carbonyl group, which further complicates matters.

All these aldehydes aren’t that good to us when present in large concentrations in our blood. After all, it is already the case that glucose can morph into an aldehyde and react with haemoglobin proteins — that’s the very thing that diabetics dread, of course.

When we are overconsuming processed carbohydrates comprising all this HFCS, the danger is that we would be accumulating these aldehydes in our bodies.

Because these aldehydes are highly reactive and can cause the Maillard reaction to occur within our body internally, where the carbonyl group on the sugar/aldehyde reacts with the amino group on a protein:

The Maillard reaction has three stages. First, the carbonyl group of a sugar reacts with an amino group on a protein or amino acid to produce water and an unstable glycosylamine. Then, the glycosylamine undergoes Amadori rearrangements to produce a series of aminoketose compounds. Last, a multitude of molecules, including some with flavor, aroma, and color, are created when the aminoketose compounds undergo a host of further rearrangements, conversions, additions, and polymerizations.

This Maillard reaction is one of the factors that are responsible for the non-enzymatic browning of foods.

The slightly browned potato chip that comes out of a freshly opened pack of potato chips? That’s the Maillard reaction right there. Freshly baked brown bread? Roasted brown coffee? Grilled brown steaks? All that browning comes from the Maillard reaction.

The initial step that sets off the Maillard reaction chain is the reaction of a carbonyl group on a sugar molecule reacting with an amino group on a protein or amino acid.

So by consuming excessive amounts of dietary carbohydrates…

We’d be risking having too many reactive aldehydes in our blood from metabolizing all that glucose and fructose.

Similarly, chronic excessive alcohol consumption also generates a ton of reactive acetaldehyde that can deal a crap ton of damage to the liver.

Is it that surprising why we can see people experiencing fatty liver disease of EITHER the alcoholic OR the non-alcoholic variant?

Because it boils back down to the amount of aldehydes that we have in our blood.

As an aside: what would happen if these aldehydes were to do a Maillard reaction with the amino groups on DNA molecules to force mutations?

Would we not be looking at the potential of cancer development if one’s autophagy mechanism were already faulty?

But we’d actually start to age prematurely first

Because the collagen in our body actually requires cross-linking to obtain a stable structure — that’s where our skin derives its structural support from.

This cross-linking is dependent on an aldol condensation reaction, where 2 amine groups on adjacent collagen strands are converted into aldehydes, which then react together to form a cross-link:

And of course, when aldehyde chemistry is involved, one can bet that those sugar aldehydes can work their way towards reacting with the collagen aldehydes. It’s the most normal thing to do.

But at the same time, when that happens, the collagen strands can’t cross-link as well as they ought to be, and we’d see its mechanical strength decrease.

So much so that it just can’t provide sufficient structural support, and its internal scaffolds can collapse in certain areas.

We’d call that wrinkles and aging, no?

So we don’t really want too much of it in our diets.

The cells in our body may use carbohydrates to generate energy…

But we’re being bombarded with too damn much.

It’s just that lucrative, though.

Especially when it becomes a psychological/emotional battle to cut down or eliminate ice cream from one’s diet, isn’t it? Considering how much of a comfort food it can be to a lot of people?

And we do know — whenever we try to pit a logical argument against an emotional argument, the emotion wins.

Logically, we may try to restrict ourselves from eating all these carbs…

But emotionally, when we do want it… There’s only so much that we can coerce ourselves to not do it, right?

It all starts in the mind.

We do have to remind ourselves that whatever is best for somebody else’s business is not necessarily the best for our health. No matter how much emotional marketing and advertisements out there will have us feel otherwise.

Joel Yong, Ph.D., is a biochemical engineer/scientist, an educator and a writer. He has authored 5 ebooks (available on Amazon.com in Kindle format) and co-authored 6 journal articles in internationally peer-reviewed scientific journals. His main focus is on crafting strategies to support optimal biochemical functions in the human body at https://thethinkingscientist.substack.com.